Goal Model for Dynamic Systems (GMoDS)

The objective of this project is to define and formalize a Goal Model for Dynamic Systems (GMoDS). The initial requirements for GMoDS included:

• GMoDS must be able to have a model to represent goals and their relationships. The system designer must be able to specify the overall goal of the system and iteratively decompose it into several subgoals that can be achieved by agents in the system.
• Multiagent systems are event driven by their nature and thus must include events. In order for the application to reason about the events that occur in the environment those events the designer must define those events. The events must allow the goal model to dynamically adapt to the changes occurring in the environment.

• Because multiagent systems are distributed, they require a method for defining an ordering. Therefore, the model should also allow the designer to specify a partial of full ordering of goal achievement. Applications need to use a full ordering if there are goals that need to be sequentially accomplished and either a partial or no ordering if the goals can be accomplished independently. The ability to order goals gives the designer more flexibility when specifying the goal model. A restrictive design includes a full ordering, while a less restrictive design requires only a portion of the goals to be ordered. The partial ordering allows the system to choose the order of the goal achievement.

The scope of this project is limited to the formal definition of the semantics of the analysis model, the translation of the specified model to the runtime model, the semantics of the runtime model, and a proof of concept implementation. The scope will not cover such things as how the system assigns goals, how to find an optimal set of assignments or the elicitation of requirements.

GMoDS Publications

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Sponsors

This research is sponsored by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) and the National Science Foundation (NSF).